Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps he has taken to facilitate access to superfast broadband for people who live in (a) Bexleyheath and Crayford constituency and (b) Bexley Borough.

According to data from Thinkbroadband (www.thinkbroadband.com) the current superfast broadband coverage (speeds of more than 24Mbps) in the Bexleyheath and Crayford constituency is 96% and in the London Borough of Bexley it is 96.6%. The Government expects superfast broadband coverage within London to be provided by the private sector and there is therefore no government-funded superfast project. Providers including BT Openreach, Virgin Media and Hyperoptic all have current or planned network coverage within Bexley.

During 2017 DCMS worked with a number of London Boroughs, including Bexley, to ensure proportionate mechanisms are in place to enable access to the highways by broadband providers for network deployment.

For any premises not covered by superfast broadband, as confirmed in our announcement in December 2017, we are pushing ahead with our plans for a Universal Service Obligation (USO) so that by 2020 everyone across the UK will have a clear, enforceable right to request 10 Megabit per second broadband.

In September we launched Wave 1 of the Local Full Fibre Network programme in 6 locations across the UK, and used expressions of interest gathered in this period to shape a Challenge Fund Wave 2, which was launched on 22nd November 2017.

The Challenge Fund was available in open competition for local bodies from across all regions to bid into on a competitive basis to fund full fibre connections and upgrades to public sector assets and amenities. Bidding for the Challenge Fund closed on 26th January 2018 and we are currently assessing applications with successful bids being announced in March 2018.